Participatory Exploration Policy Recommendations for National Aeronautics and Space Administration

Participatory exploration was first introduced in 2007 at the NASA Participatory Exploration Summit at Ames Research Center and was prioritized into the NASA Authorization Act of 2008 (H.R. 6063), highlighting its necessity to NASA’s continued public relevance in the 21st century. We have written a paper for NASA senior management that discusses the role of “participatory exploration” as a way of “aggregating and leveraging people’s contributions in ways that are useful to other people” which can be applied to NASA programs and projects to engage the American public in the exploration experience and to identify opportunities for the direct involvement of the public, the private sector, nongovernmental organizations, and international partners.  The paper includes specific recommendations which we have summarized below.  We’ve posted the paper on openNASA for your consideration and encourage you to share your thoughts on Participatory Exploration as well. Please share your thoughts via the comments below or on if you have specific ideas or recommendations, via the ideas forum.

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The new NASA Authorization Act, currently awaiting Bush’s signature, cuts NASA’s total authorized spending on conferences by two-thirds, to $5 million in FY 09. NASA, and the aerospace industry in general, love conferences, so this is causing a good deal of consternation. While certainly some face to face interaction at conferences is valid and important for knowledge sharing and professional relationship building, I’m personally of the opinion that much of NASA’s investment in conferences– especially pricey invite-only events like the Future Forums that celebrated NASA’s 50th Anniversary this year– could be better spent deploying better online tools for communication, education, training, professional networking and remote collaboration. That said, some conferences still play and important role in the work of the aerospace industry and the civilian space program.

How can we cut NASA’s conference budget by two-thirds while maintaining as much of the value of NASA’s conference participation as possible? Two possible solutions to look into include: Read the rest of this entry »

Recently I was asked to reflect on how the lessons of online organizing by those of us who worked in the 2004 Presidential campaign have impacted not only the 2008 Presidential campaign (in which Dean ‘04 and Clark ‘04 veterans teamed up to create Blue State Digital, the technology backbone of Obama’s online operation), but also the Federal Government, over the past four years.

Many 2004 campaign veterans have been working in the realm of making government more open in order to enable watchdog oversight of it. I have been working more in the realm of trying to make government more efficient and effective through technologies and organizing techniques that promote openness. I’m personally mostly focused on the cultural and policy side of things– trying to get people inside NASA used to being more open and sharing by default rather than only when explicitly forced to. There is also a great deal of work being done by reformers in the CIO’s offices and elsewhere on the communications technology side of NASA’s operations. They’re working on open APIs, open-source licenses, etc. I’ve told a bit of this story, in the context of NASA, in several presentations over the past year. Here below I’ve attempted to break down the problems, implications and solutions I see in a more structured format, again using examples we have encountered at NASA.

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